About us
The Advanced Retail Team
David’s ethos for the business is:
Ensuring the quality of customer relationships by striving for quality in everything we do and a belief that success comes through supporting people.
David Billingham, Managing Director
David has worked in the retail sector for his whole career to date and across a broad range of roles, so understands it well. He started his career in Majestic Wines where he worked for 10 years, initially at the coalface as a Store Manager and then he was moved to an IT Support role in the head office. David also spent some time at Habitat where he learned important lessons on how not to do retail.
During his time at Majestic Wine, David was instrumental in the implementation of one of the first Windows EPoS systems in the country. This instilled in him a deep level of expertise and enthusiasm for retail technology that has never gone away. That understanding was noted and David was subsequently head hunted by the software company that supplied the Majestic Wine system, Poise Associates. David was initially recruited by Poise as a software developer and quickly moved up through the ranks ending up finally as a Director and shareholder. In March 2012 David acquired sole ownership of what was to become the successor company, Advanced Retail (UK) Ltd.
Majestic’s ‘customer first’ ethos is something that David has taken to heart throughout his career and has driven everything he has done both prior to and since founding Advanced Retail. His initial retail experience coupled with in depth technology expertise has given him a unique customer focused perspective when providing retail business solutions.
Gareth's ethos for the business is:
I work on the basis that a customer’s problem is my problem and I will do whatever it takes to resolve it to their satisfaction.
Gareth Dewhirst, Customer Services Director
Gareth is Customer Services Director at Advanced Retail, responsible for successful customer implementation and support. To date he has spent more than 25 years in IT in the Retail, Health and Manufacturing sectors of which 14 years have been in customer support working with large organisations (Ford, BMW and NHS) and smaller clients (Smaller retail chains and Garden Centres).
Gareth really understands both the human and technical aspects of any new technology adoption ensuring the smoothest handover. Gareth has extensive experience in ITIL and PRINCE2 (certified practitioner) practices that will ensure the smooth running of complex implementations both to time and budget. With experience and an ethos of providing 24×7 support, Gareth is focused on ensuring that the whole business delivers the highest level of customer satisfaction.
Since heading up Advanced Retail’s Support Operations Gareth has built up an extensive set of skills that ensure the business delivers exceptional service from start to finish.
Paul Wilson, Training and Customer Liason
Paul has been with Advanced Retail for two years but has experience of the AR Traxs system
for over eight years now having worked at a previous AR customer.
At that customer amongst other duties, Paul expanded the use of Traxs and PoS opening shops,
managed closing branches, oversaw stock accuracy through managed stocktakes and ensured that
the AR system was integrated with other internal systems running customer management,
warehouse management and accounts.
Overall, Paul has over 40 years of IT experience including within that 14 years of retail understanding.
He is experienced in data insights, processes, training and documenting all of those aspects.
Day to day Paul carries out customer training, both online and in person "train the trainer",
he project manages onboarding new customers, creates prototype reports in PowerBI for customers
and keeps documentation current.